Curious about the possibilities of such a concoction, I doused a carrot in it and proffered it to my chubby little dog, whom the vet had recently advised we start slimming by substituting veggies for his usual treats. He sniffed at it, eyed me suspiciously, and dropped it from his snaggle-toothed maw. It wasn't the last time my dog ate carrots, but if there were a threat that one out of every few would smell like burned electrical tape and taste worse, I'd start picking and choosing, too.

That bacon spray is the embodiment of what bugs me about bacon these days, like a physical incarnation of the trite pro-bacon blanket sentiments that people rarely seem to express about other meats. (Ever heard anybody say, "Everything tastes better with goat?" Exactly.)

Of course I understand where it comes from. Bacon is fatty. Bacon is salty. Bacon's appeal is primal. Bacon is about bombast, not subtlety. If William Carlos Williams had written that poem about bacon instead of plums, I don't think it would have resonated the same way.

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